Ars longa, vita brevis

The 18 Things You Need to Move to Paris

After a decade in Silicon Valley at two startups — one venture backed, one that my partners and I founded, bootstrapped, and sold — we packed up our apartment in SOMA, rented it out and moved to Paris for a six month sabbatical with my wife, cat, and what I guess are my favorite objects:

We packed everything into a total of three suitcases, two backpacks and a cat carrier.

The amount of stuff we sold, donated, or recycled was absolutely extraordinary. I think it was 70-80% of our total stuff. The whole process was nearly marriage-ruining. Yet looking back at it all, I’m hard pressed to remember the specifics: what was all that stuff?